Bacula-users

Re: [Bacula-users] Slow disks RAID10 vs Fast disks RAID5

2012-11-22 21:27:55
Subject: Re: [Bacula-users] Slow disks RAID10 vs Fast disks RAID5
From: Chris Adams <cmadams AT hiwaay DOT net>
To: "bacula-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net" <bacula-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net>
Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2012 20:23:21 -0600
Once upon a time, John Kenyon <JKenyon AT bgwgroup.com DOT au> said:
> 2 x 300GB 15K SAS (RAID 1) - This will have OS (centos 64 bit) and Bacula 
> MySQL catalog 

I have a new server running RHEL 6 with 15K SAS RAID1 for the OS.  It
has an external disk shelf with 12 2TB 7200 RPM SATA drives connected to
a regular (non-RAID) SAS controller.  I'm using Linux software RAID; I
have two RAID5 sets and a RAID0 on top of that (Linux doesn't support a
direct RAID50, but you can get there with RAID-on-RAID).  I have a
Postgres catalog and the Bacula file backup on the array.

The servers I'm backing up are all connected to gigabit switches, using
a dedicated VLAN for backups (each server has at least two NICs).

When the full backup runs, the backup server hits 950 megabits per
second when all the jobs are running.  Most don't last long (a bunch of
servers with less than 5-6GB each), so then the network throughput
drops.

Even when the network is running at full speed, I'm not seeing anything
on the backup server that looks like an I/O bottleneck.

One note on the storage: with RAID50, I get an effective space of almost
20TB.  However, ext4 can't make a filesystem that big (the disk format
and kernel driver support it, but mke2fs didn't until very recently).
RHEL puts XFS support in a layered product (extra cost), so I'm not
using that.  I just partitiond the software RAID device into 16TB and
the rest and am just using the 16TB filesystem right now (the rest is
there for extra space as needed for random stuff).

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams AT hiwaay DOT net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.

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